It seems like the FizzBuzz meme has resurfaced, thanks to this reply to Raganwald’s post on the subject. Since I didn’t get on the bandwagon last time, I thought I’d take a crack at implementing with a bit of a twist: using the Haskell type system! This is my first moderately large type level program, so it’s probably not quite as elegant as it could be, but it does work and is fairly readable.

My dissertation this year has been on adding Simon Peyton Jones and Phil Wadlers Comprehensive Comprehensions to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and I might blog about that in the future. During this work, I needed to come up with some test cases for the generalized list comprehensions and so inspired by this post by LukeH I decided to implement a ray tracer in Haskell where all the raytracing logic is put within a single comprehension!

This is the second post in a series of three covering the running key cipher. You can find the first part here.

My last post, which detailed my switch to Mac, got a lot of attention from an unexpected audience: designers of password manager programs! Not only did I get a welcoming comment from the co-author of the wonderful 1Password, but I also received an email from Marco Barulli of Clipperz, an online password manager which I mentioned only briefly. Marco quite rightly wanted to point out that some of the things I said about his product could potentially be misleading, and so in the interests of accuracy I’m reproducing the meat of exchange (with his permission!) here in public:

So, I finally switched to Mac a month ago. I’ve had a Mac laptop since last summer and have been very pleased with the experience, so since Windows Vista has been giving me huge amounts of trouble (e.g. see my last post on getting Cygwin to work, though I won’t go into the full gamut of issues I had here) I decided to go for an Apple desktop machine too.